Kimi Raikkonen has blamed traffic for preventing him from setting a quick lap time during Q2 today after the Finn ended qualifying in the wall at turn four following a spin.

Raikkonen, who returns to Ferrari in 2014 after five years away, finished qualifying down in 12th place, and he did not hide his frustration after the session on Saturday afternoon.

“Qualifying wasn’t straightforward today, especially because of traffic,” he explained. “When I was on a quick lap, I had a car in front of me at every corner. That stopped me getting a clean lap and at the end of Q2, I spun off damaging the front wing.”

However, Raikkonen already knew that he was too slow to make it into the top ten before his spin, and he is aware that there is a lot of work to do in the race on Sunday if he is to get to grips with the F14 T.

“I don’t think I’d have gone quicker anyway, as I had already reduced my speed at this point, because I knew already I wouldn’t make it to Q3. It’s a shame, because compared to yesterday we have made some steps forward.

“We know we have a lot of work to do in every area, especially on car set-up, but at the same time, we are sure we are going in the right direction. Tomorrow’s race will be tough, the weather forecast is unclear and on top of that, with the new rules, it’s hard to predict how things will go. But it’s only the first race of the year and we will do our best to get a good result.”

The Finn has not appeared to be as comfortable with the car as teammate Fernando Alonso, who qualified up in fifth place on Saturday. However, should the forecast rain arrive on Sunday, Raikkonen could yet stand a chance of picking up a good haul of points, and perhaps even emulating his win on debut for the team back in 2007.

“I was just playing around with the switches or something and got a little bit of wheelspin and touched the wall,” Raikkonen said. “It was just one mistake. I just got a little bit of wheelspin. I wasn’t pushing anymore anyhow but just got wheelspin. I just couldn’t catch it. That didn’t change the fact that we would not have gone through anyhow.”

It doesn’t make sense on why Ferrari wouldn’t do the best it can to get Kimi a car he can fight with. this only reinforces my belief… if the car is bad, Kimi will really suffer. but with Alonso, even if the car is bad he will still be able to get maximum points out of it. people have to stop making excuses for Kimi.